On Wednesday 11 June 2003 18:11, Daniel Vainsencher wrote: > Common practice notwithstanding, in any teaching mission, the zeroeth > directive is "don't bore the student". I think that rules out Pascal and > Ada for much the same reasons - they are tedious, verbose languages. The > Polish aunts of programming ;-) > > As to strictness, in my experience*, compiler errors teach students to > not err, but nothing about programming. Premature terminations, debug > logs, wrong output - those are types of feedback that induce > exploration.
I'm no expert on comparing languages. But I finished a 5pt 'computers' (pascal) bagrut last year, so I know about teaching elementary programming in highschool. The real problem of the bagrut imo is that its emphasis isn't on data structures, or algorithms, or concepts like OOP or proper data hiding. It's on language syntax. You get about as many points deducted for a few missing ; or . chars as for a completely wrong algorithm. And when you're forced to write everything on paper (without an eraser mind you), trivial syntax errors that'd be caught by the compiler can suddenly become quite hard to avoid, because in the case of pascal it's not a language you actually use outside school. This is what makes study so boring, because the interesting and beautiful things come second to remembering the arbitrary syntax of dead language. The existing idea of writing the so-called verbal algorithms is good in principle; it can help teach programming principles and present algorithms without mucking about with a rather low-level language's syntax. However as presently implemented it has two problems. First, it's still secondary to pascal (learned after pascal iirc). It's taught as an end and not as a tool. Second, it is in Hebrew. This is purely IMHO, but programming in Hebrew doesn't come naturally to me - I don't know how easy it is for native Hebrew speakers. (I'm not a native English speaker either, so I've a right to say which language is easier to use. But I suppose it's mostly a matter of experience.) -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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